This course will highlight the most interesting experiments within the field of psychology, discussing the implications of those studies for our understanding of the human mind and human behavior. We will explore the brain and some of the cognitive abilities it supports like memory, learning, attention, perception and consciousness. We will examine human development - both in terms of growing up and growing old - and will discuss the manner in which the behavior of others affect our own thoughts and behavior. Finally we will discuss various forms of mental illness and the treatments that are used to help those who suffer from them.
The fact of the matter is that humans routinely do amazing things without appreciating how interesting they are. However, we are also routinely influenced by people and events without always being aware of those influences. By the end of this course you will have gained a much better understanding and appreciation of who you are and how you work. And I can guarantee you that you'll learn things that you'll be telling your friends and family about, things that will fundamentally change the way you think of yourself and others. How can you resist that?!

MS

Professor Steve Joordens is beyond awesome!! He made the Introduction to Psychology MOOC both interesting and fun. I would highly recommend this course to everyone. I give it a five-star rating!

DA

Mar 24, 2017

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

The teacher was amazing! I was so entertained with the material we were taught throughout the few months!\n\nDefinitely recommend this course so anyone with curiosity to why we do what we do!

Aus der Unterrichtseinheit

The Matter of the Mind

There was a time when one could study Psychology without linking phenomena back to the brain itself, but those days are slowly disappearing. Now every Psychology student, yourself included, is expected to have at least a general knowledge of brain organization and structure. At the end of this section you will be able to locate structures of the brain and discuss its organization.

Unterrichtet von

Steve Joordens

Professor

Skript

Hey, I feel the need to explain. That where is it, okay. that last, second last letter is supposed to be an a, temporal, temporal lobes that's what we're going to talk about. I tried to make it look like an ear. I failed miserably. I'm not an artist. I'm a, I'm a prof. but there, there you go, temporal lobe. we're going to continue our tour. we're basically, we were at the back of the brain. And now, what we're going to do is move forward basically to an area kind of under our ears. Which is not really coincidental. this one makes a little bit more sense than the occipital does because the temporal lobes is primarly devoted to our ability to perceive sounds of different sorts. so, let's take the tour. Hop on the little train, make our way up to the temporal lobes. Here we go. Week 2: Lecture 5, The Temporal Lobe. So, I say temporal lobe but, but, you know, let me make clear that you know, the brain does have this separate hemisphere kind of thing. So, like the occipital lobe there's literally two occipital lobes, there's two temporal lobes, there's going to be two parietal lobes, there's going to be two frontal lobes. And in fact, that will become relevant in this lecture because sometimes the lobe, the lobes on each side of the brain do slightly different things. So, let's get there. So, first of all though, let's just be clear about where we were. So, we started in the occipital lobe, and our, and our tour of this brain has now taken us forward to this area, roughly under our ears. Now, it's kind of interesting, like the occipital lobe, the temporal lobe has a primary sensory part and association part. The primary sensory part is, is sort of inside. It's these dark green areas here. So, it's kind of folded within the brain a little bit. But it's the same story there that if you had damage anywhere to the cortical tissue in here, you would actually have auditory problems. There are perhaps frequencies you wouldn't hear. so, you know, this again, is really the area that's taking the primary sensory input from the world, the primary sounds. And then, passing it along to other areas that then do more in-depth processing of what it actually is we're hearing. So, they do more of the recognition process, rather than the reception. You can kind of think of it that way, sensation, perception. Sensation is kind of receiving the signal. Perception is now trying to recognize what it is that you're hearing, in this case, by matching those sounds up to sounds we've known in the past. Okay, so memory, again, is playing a big role here. I like this particular figure, because it also allows me to highlight that these areas that we're defining are more or less defined by these sulci and fissures of the brain that we were talking about earlier. So, you notice the parietal lobe, that we have this thing called the, sorry, the occipital lobe. The preoccipital notch, here. There's this little area here, where, you know, from here back, it's, it's, it's considered the occipital lobe. From here forward, it's considered the temporal lobe. Now, we do cut across some gyri here. Cutting across that one as well, so it's not a perfect, you know, it's not like the brain comes in, in four little chunks. But it does seem as though, you can define areas based on these fissures, and that, that the definition makes a little sense. you know, that, that it is the areas within that do seem focused on specific areas. I'm also though, going to challenge that a little bit, or I'm at least going to show that sometimes we'll focus on certain areas. If there's an area between the two different lobes, that usually makes sense too. It's usually performing some function that's a mix of what the two lobes do. We're going to get a taste of that. Alright. So, let's, let's move on. You know what we're talking about now and, and by the way, you see that these gyruses and sulci, they all have fancy names like this. again, I'm not going to worry about too much terminology wise, but I present it just you know, to be as clear as possible. Alright, so now we get into that issue of laterality, it's what it's called. Now, you have heard this before, I'm sure, the notion that we, we talk about certain people being left brained or certain people being right brained. and the notion is that the left side of our brain is much more analytic, the right side of our brain is much more creative. And the claims is that for certain individuals, maybe one or the other side of the brain dominates somehow. So, they're either more analytic people or they're more creative people. I, I honestly believe that it's sometimes very much overblown in the popular literature popular, popular media. the, the reality is that the brain is connected by that corpus callosum, and that information flows so quickly between the two sides of the brain that the brain really does function as a unitary whole. but that said, there are times when what the left side oft the brain is doing is different from what the right side of the brain is doing. And that's where all this laterality notion comes from. One of the most dramatic examples is in case, is in fact, right here in the temporal lobes. And it's the distinction between language processing versus sound processing, non, non-verbal processing let's say, non-verbal sounds. So, let's look at the left side. So, we now, you know, this person, this individual is facing to, to all of our. I had to figure out if it was mine or, or all of our. To all of our left. and we're looking at now, the left side of their brain. Now, remember the primary cortex is folded in here. And we have the, the temporal area is right around here. Now, to the back of that temporal area is Wernicke's area. And to the front and actually sneaking into the frontal lobes here is Broca's area. We've talked about Broca's area before. this is the area where if patients had damage to this area, they could not produce spoken speech. and one of the things you'll notice is that when we get through talking about the frontal lobes, is there's a strip here that we're going to call the motor strip. And this is the, the part of the brain that sends signals to the body to command it to move. And if you actually think of language, producing language is all about that, it's all about using the muscles in your, in your throat, using air from your lungs, using your mouth and your tongue, and everything in your mouth to shape sound. and so, it is a very motor process. And that's why, you know, even though Broca's area is primarily devoted to speech, which is, you know, it sounds like an like an auditory thing, it's, it's devoted to the production of speech. So, it's a little more in the motor areas. Wernickes, however, is devoted to the reception of speech. So, people with damage to this area have trouble understanding speech. they have trouble, if you spoke to them, they, they wouldn't know what you're saying. They might be able to produce speech perfectly fine, if their Broca's area is fine. But they couldn't comprehend speech. That's a big part of what the left hemisphere does. It takes this raw auditory sound and it's like the left is always looking for language kinds of sounds, and passing them to Wernicke's area, and then decoding them. So, the left is very much about language. And of course, we use language for a lot of our thinking. Or at least, we feel like we hear, you know, ourselves talking in our minds. And that's why, that's one of the reasons people say the left brain is the more analytical. That when we're thinking about things, it's a Wernicke's area. We, we literally do, by the way, talk to ourselves. When, when we think about things, Broca's area is lighting up a little bit,and Wernicke's area is lighting up a little bit. We are literally talking to ourselves in our mind. and, you know, that seems like, usually we do that when we're trying to figure stuff out or sort things out. So, that's sort of why people say this is analytical. Now, if we look more at the, at the right side of the brain. So now, we're looking here at a top looking from the top at the left and the right of a brain. And we have the temporal lobes highlighted here. what this is showing is that if you give people a task where they're supposed to listen to music like sounds and figure out either the tonal structure what which, which is all about sort of what key a piece is in. Or they're worried about pitch patterns. Is it going up in pitch or down in pitch? Or pitch intervals. How many steps up in pitch or down in pitch? Or this really kind of odd thing called timbre. timbre is [SOUND] it's, it's really kind of hard to describe. But if you play a certain note on both the guitar and a piano, they sound different because of the overtones that come from the specific instrument. And so, they sound like a guitar or like a piano. and so, if you give people tasks where they're supposed to work on things like this, music-like sounds, then the areas that you see being involved in that tend to be on the right side of the brain. and so, this is that interesting now, distinction we have where language seems to be a left side of the brain thing. But musical perception seems to be a right side of the brain thing. And of course, music we think of as more creative, you know, creative based. So, hence that notion of the analytical versus the creative side of the brain. But again, let me always stress, these two talk. And they talk very quickly and, and very fluently. So, you know, literally when we interact, like imagine something like listening to hip hop or spoken word where, where there is musical component, but there is also a linguistic component. You know, virtually any singer, song writer. we're, we're very able to combine those two things, very fluently. But it does seem like separate parts of the brain are doing their own separate bits which is really kind of fascinating. Alright. This, of course, has, has grown. We're going to see other examples of laterality. We didn't in the, in the occipital lobe, we don't see anything dramatic like that in the occipital lobe. but we will see some others as we continue our tour. especially on the prime and the lobe. and I just kind of threw this in because this is more of a public perception of the left brain and the right brain. And the left brain does all this kind of stuff. Analysis, logic, lists, number, words, lines, you know, hence your analytic kind of side. Whereas the right side of the brain is doing this bigger kind of stuff. Colors, daydreaming, 3D, rhythm, imagination, synthesis. I can't help but mention here, there's, there's a book about, it's called A Stroke Of Inside. a book about a brain. A researcher who suffers a stroke. And her claim is that it's actually kind of, that strokes are not painful and they're actually kind of nice in a way because strokes usually hit the left side of the brain and they usually shut down a lot of these functions. So, suddenly you stop with all your day to day worries. And instead, you get this, in her opinion, oneness with the universe kind of feeling, when the right brain really dominates, because the left brain's getting hit. So, she describes this situation where she knows something's wrong. she knows that she's suffering some sort of traumatic issue with her brain. But it kind of feels good. She kind of feels like she's losing all the worries of the world and becoming in touch with the oneness of the universe. And it's really hard for her, in that state, to continue the process of trying to get help. Because she keeps coming back to that nice feeling. So, you know, that, that'll be an interesting one for you to check out as well, if you're a reader check that book out. Alrighty, so, a few other things for you here. I didn't hyperlink this, but one of my favorite bands is, is a band called Rush. Canadian band. Way to go Rush. Recently inducted into the Hall of Fame finally. rock and roll hall of fame. but they have an album called Hemisphere. Which plays with this whole left brain versus right brain distinction. So, if you want to learn through music I recommend Hemisphere. videos here's more on both the occipital and the temporal. So, I threw this one in, because it will allow you to combine what we've been talking about the last couple lectures. And this is a really fascinating one, this is a researcher named Ramachandran. And he studies temporal lobe, epilepsy and, and the feeling that some of these epileptics have when they have a seizure, of becoming very close to God. So, there's really interesting notion of, you know, the relation between, between the temporal lobes and, and our sense and feeling of, of a presence of others and a presence of a God. So, fascinating. Ramachandran, everything he does is really interesting. So, so, check that out. Readings just a Wikipedia thing on the temporal lobe. I threw this one in, partly for you to see how non-developed it is. I want to encourage you, as you learn more about psychology, to think every now and then about maybe updating Wikipedia pages. Maybe making them better, in whatever language, you know, however, not good this is in English, it's probably even less good in other languages. So, if you're fluent in another language and you want to take some of what you learn and throw it into Wikipedia, you will be kind of doing what I'm doing. You're, you'll be providing information to the masses. which is kind of a cool feeling. So, I throw that for that. This last one I put this in to give you a taste of scientific publication. So, this is a journal called, Laterality. So, they focus on these left-right distinctions of the brain. and they have some free articles available. Some of their most popular articles. So, I thought, you know, if you're at all curious, what does it actually look like when a scientist does a study on the brain, and then reports the results? Well, you can take a look and most of these are really kind of interesting, neat concepts. So, so, I threw that in there to give you that side of the whole academic progress issue. Alrighty. So, there's the temporal lobe. next step will be to the very top of the brain to an area called the parietal lobe. Follow me, just this way.